Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Trafalgar account for sale...

A description of the horrors of the Battle of Trafalgar written by a barely-literate below-decks seaman is to be auctioned next month.The document describes the action of Britain's greatest naval victory from the point of view of Robert Sands, a 17-year-old "powder monkey" on the Temeraire.[snip]Sands, from Rochester, Kent, was rated as "Boy, third class", the lowest form of life on a line-of-battle ship in Nelson's command.His story opens with a description of the famous signal to the fleet sent by Nelson: "He said he oped that Everey man would doo his Duty this day for old Englands sake for it would be a gloureus day for them that lived to see the end of it."

A new theory on why it becomes more difficult to learn languages as we age:

Instead of language skills deteriorating with age, as was once thought, the brain becomes better at filtering out sounds which are not needed in the native tongue.As a result, adults do not recognise sounds which are vital to other languages because they have lost their childhood ability to hear small sound differences.